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Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 |
Congress's last comprehensive scheme for control of immigration prior to the 1990 Act and IIRIRA was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (INA). The INA was the first piece of legislation to include all aspects of immigration policy, including naturalization, in one statute. The INA contains four titles: title I includes definitions and enunciates the powers of the various government actors; title II sets out the basic structure for immigration; title III contains the rules for naturalization and United States nationality; and title IV contains miscellaneous provisions, such as savings clauses.
Extensive amendments to the INA have been enacted since 1952, including the major reform packages enacted in 1965 and 1976, the provisions on refugees and political asylum in 1980, the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, the Immigration Act of 1990, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, the USA PATRIOT Act, and the Homeland Security Act.
Among the most significant changes in the law have been the progressive revision of the immigration selection structure to remove remaining biases toward particular countries or areas of the world (although the 1990 Act added provisions that reinstitute some narrow preferences to nationals of countries "underrepresented" in the immigrant mix), the addition of a number of nonimmigrant visa categories (the J through S categories), the restructuring of the requirements for Department of Labor certification for aliens seeking to immigrate based on an offer of permanent employment in the United States, and the just-mentioned refugee and asylum provisions. The basic structure of the INA is outlined in the following sections, and detailed in the rest of this volume. The particularly important changes to the INA put into place by the 1986 Act, the 1990 Act, IIRIRA, the USA PATRIOT Act, and the Homeland Security Act are discussed in more detail in the following subsections.
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